More than a few artists have harnessed unusual materials to make memorable works of art: think Rauschenberg's stuffed goat, Janine Antoni's cubes of gnawed chocolate and lard, or videos and performances by Paul McCarthy using fake blood, raw meat and … well, let's not go there.
Try as I might, I could not think of one artist's work that was made of petrified bread — until I heard about Apo Torosyan.
Curiosity got me in the door to see Torosyan's show Bread Series/Immigration Installation at the Florida Holocaust Museum, which includes about 40 abstract paintings that the Istanbul-born artist constructed with painstakingly preserved loaves of bread, canvas, paint and assorted mixed media. What kept me riveted was the work's gut-wrenching content.
Keep in mind that the Florida Holocaust Museum has a broader mission than its name lets on. In addition to sustaining the memory of the 6 million Jews murdered by Nazis during the World War II, the museum shines a spotlight on all forms of genocide, regardless of where the crime occurs, what faith its victims practice or the color of their skin. (That "ethnic cleansing" remains a crisis in today's world seems eminently worth noting a week after the Bush administration finally imposed sanctions on Sudan over the violence in Darfur.)
Torosyan's work takes on the lesser-known Armenian Genocide at the hands of Turks from 1915 to 1917 — a series of events the Turkish government still refuses to acknowledge as genocide. Growing up in Istanbul with an Armenian father and a Greek mother, Torosyan, who now lives in Boston, learned that his grandparents, along with hundreds of thousands of other victims, starved to death during a concerted effort to exterminate the minority ethnic group.
Like Germany's Jews, the Armenians — Christians in a largely Muslim country — were reviled for achieving financial and educational success, Torosyan explained during an interview from his home. In video documentaries produced by the artist and included in the exhibit, elderly survivors, often with tears streaming down their faces, tell of watching as loved ones were killed by the roving Turkish military; others were left to die of hunger.
The paintings, quite understandably, are the stuff of obsession. On each canvas, a loaf of bread takes some form: torn in half and placed next to a half-portrait of Mehmed Talat Pasha — a sort of Ottoman Hitler — like yin and yang, or arranged as small slices of toast, disturbingly evocative of the tiny children who made up many of the victims. Mixed-media additions, including photos of Armenians, symbolic swatches of fabric, like blood-red lace, and soil, punctuate the repetition of bread as a symbol of a basic human right denied.
Perhaps most arresting, though, are the piles of dark brown earth arranged like mass graves or mountainous obstructions throughout the gallery. A loaf of bread sits atop each, pinning down a newspaper. One English-language page brings news of the Iraq war, where a breakdown in government has resulted in open conflict between ethnic Sunni and Shi'a groups — yet another chapter in a cycle of warfare that, as both this particular exhibit and the Holocaust Museum in general remind us, must end.
The spirit of humanism is likewise alive and well in portraits by Judy Dater at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, which remain on view for just one more week.
The more than two dozen black-and-white photos showcase a diversity of human faces — alternately peaceful and passionate, romantic and stoic, youthful and aged — as blank canvases for the drives and emotions we all have in common. Half culled from her encounters in Rome, where Dater was artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome, and half from Berkeley, Calif., where she lives, they run the gamut of gender, age and ethnicity.
During an interview from her home, Dater, 65, recalled her first fascination with cameras as a child. Her father, an amateur photographer, owned a neighborhood movie theater in Hollywood, where Dater spent hours upon hours. Despite being surrounded by images of celebrities, she gravitated toward photographing everyday people.
"I like to photograph people that nobody knows, because I like people to look at them and to wonder who they are," Dater said. She prefers viewers to "make up your own scenarios about them, rather than think you know something that … you don't."
She regards her models as a "cast of characters," often seeking out people with a particular look she craves — like Roman Maria Rosaria Domenici's Renaissance-painting-worthy profile — and an openness to the experience. Each sitting functions a bit like an acting class between the photographer and the model, from searching for a spontaneous moment that encapsulates the sitter's personality, to reenacting it naturally for the portrait. (The exceptions in this exhibit are an array of more candid street shots of Romans arranged in the entryway.)
The absence of explanatory labels — because the photos aren't documentary but interpretive, Dater emphasizes — leaves the visitor plenty of room to muse and ruminate about their content.
Still, I found myself jonesing to know something about these folks, like Erik von Euw, whose caress with a naked sword blade imparts a slight tingle of danger (turns out he's Dater's stepson, the picture taken for his high school graduation), or Raul Hoefer (a former student who has gone on to be a fashion photographer, Dater said), a tough-looking guy posed with a Day of the Dead skull mask.
What about the one portrait shot from behind? That's June Wayne, founder of Tamarind Lithography Workshop, a renowned print studio once based in Los Angeles, now located at the University of New Mexico and called Tamarind Institute. That she could pass for a high priestess — or priest, by the gender-neutral back of her snow-white close-cropped hair — of something or other, draped in black with an antique-looking magnifying glass dangling from the back of her neck, seems entirely appropriate.
Like all of Dater's portraits, it shows much by revealing little.
This article appears in Jun 6-12, 2007.